Why Lightroom May Be The Only Photo Editor You Need

I currently use both Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Lightroom 3 to edit, size and save all the photos here at Kevin & Amanda. I love Photoshop through and through, but Lightroom has some pretty awesome features that can definitely rival Photoshop’s near and dear place in my heart. Lightroom is brimming with easy-to-use tools and sliders to lighten, brighten, enhance, and correct just about any photo you can throw its way. Below are a few of my favorite features to use in Lightroom, some “before and afters” of photos edited only in Lightroom, and the step-by-step adjustments I made to get them there. With its multitude of features, straightforward user interface, and much more reasonable price tag, I’m convinced that Lightroom could easily be the only photo editor you need. Come see what I mean.

Organizing Photos

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first, then onto the cool tools! I use Lightroom to get all my photos off my memory card and onto the computer. I then weed through and discard the photos I don’t want, and organize and arrange the remaining photos.

Some things to note when importing photos:

Make sure Render Previews: Standard is selected.

Optional: Rename your photos to something descriptive, with a lot of key words so you can search for them later if you’re looking for a particular photo. (Example: Christmas 2011 Pensacola Beach)

Here’s how I organize my photos. I put them in the Pictures folder on my computer, and then each event goes into its own subfolder. (Example: Christmas 2011)

Now you’re ready to import. After all the photos have been imported, while under the Library tab in Lightroom, I scroll through each photo and use the 1-5 number keys to “star” my favorite photos — that is, the ones I like and want to keep. I delete the rest. (To delete, select Edit > Select by Rating > None to select the “unstarred” photos then hit the Delete key to Delete from Disk.)

Then I simply drag and drop the remaining photos to arrange them in the order I want them to appear, if they aren’t already in order.

Now that we’ve got the house cleaning out of the way, let’s edit our first photo!

Crop & Straighten

My first step is to go through and crop and straighten the photos that need it. Hands down, this is a thousand times easier to do in Lightroom than Photoshop.

Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC)

Just press the “R” key to bring up the Crop and & Straighten window. The plentiful grid lines that appear are extremely helpful. There’s usually always one close to something in the photo you can use to line it up and straighten it out.

For example, the fence in the above photo. Press “R” again to apply the crop.

Much better! Now’s when the magic really starts to happen.

Under the Develop tab in Lightroom, you’ll find a multitude of tools and sliders to enhance your photo.

Vibrance & Saturation

Let’s start with Vibrance and Saturation. These two can really make the colors of a photo come to life. Vibrance enhances blues. If there’s a sky in your photo, add some Vibrance. You won’t regret it.

Sky = Vibrance. In this photo I bumped the Vibrance up to 60. As you can see, it enhanced the blues in the photo while mostly leaving the other colors as is.

Saturation enhances yellows and reds. I use Saturation more sparingly than Vibrance. It’s easy to overdo. Here I only increased the Saturation to 10. This enhanced the colors in the dirt and field while mostly leaving the sky alone.

Now here’s the before and after. Move your mouse on and off this photo to see the changes we made.

(Note: If you’re reading this post in a feed reader or email, you’ll have to click over to Kevin & Amanda to see this feature in action)

White Balance

This is one of my favorite tools to use in Lightroom. If the color in your photo just isn’t quite right, simply click on a point in the photo that should be white to balance out the entire photo.

Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC)

This is another one I always do in Lightroom instead of Photoshop. If Photoshop has a white balance tool that’s even anywhere remotely this easy to use, I’m completely missing it.

In the Develop tab of Lightroom, under the Treatment heading, you’ll see a White Balance Dropper you can use to click on a point on your photo that should be white. At this point, the whites in your photo will probably be either too blue or too yellow. As you can see in the above photo, some points are more yellow than others. For the most accurate white balance results, select the point in the photo that is the most white.

Yay! The building is white again. But the colors have lost some of their vibrancy. It’s kinda dull.

So let’s add a little Vibrance and Saturation to this photo. Huge difference. The vivid colors just bring this photo to life. I’ll admit, I don’t always use Lightroom to add Vibrance and Saturation. I’ll sometimes rely on Photoshop actions to do that for me. But with results this gorgeous, why bother with a whole other program??

Don’t worry, Photoshop. I still love you…

Let’s see the before & after. Move your mouse on and off this photo to see the changes we made.

Fill Light

I’ve recently developed a deep appreciation for Fill Light. You know that completely dreadful lighting in the middle of the day with super bright lighting and tragically harsh shadows? No matter what settings you use, usually either the shadows are way too dark, or the lighter parts are way too bright. I love to take photos in perfect lighting, but that doesn’t always happen. Fill Light & Recovery can help.

Fill Light will lighten the areas of photos that are dark with shadows. Recovery helps bring back definition to the lighter (too bright) areas for an overall even tone. (I’ll show you an example of Recovery in the next photo. )

Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC)

Let’s start with this photo. Not great to start out with but believe it or not, this dud of a shot turned out to be one of the most dramatic photos in the entire volcano series. I obviously exposed for the sky and clouds (well, maybe a little under exposed, to be perfectly honest) causing the ground to turn out too dark.

Fortunately, by just adding a little Fill Light, we can easily even out the entire tone of the photo. If we’d just upped the Exposure, the sky would’ve ended up too bright before the ground got light enough. Have I mentioned how much I love this feature?

However, now that the photo is evened out, it could still use a little Exposure boost.

That’s better. Now the photo is certainly brighter, but it also got a little flat. There’s no pop. No pizzazz. Increasing the Exposure can do that to a photo.

Therefore, whenever I crank up the Exposure, I usually increase the Blacks as well. Blacks darkens the shadows in the photo for rich contrast and depth. Ahh. Life is restored.

And since Sky = Vibrance…

This is where the magic really happens, folks.

Isn’t this a dramatic before & after? Thanks to Fill Light I was able to salvage what normally would’ve been a tragic outtake.

Recovery

Now let’s see what Fill Light and Recovery can do when working together. You’ve seen that Fill Light lightens the areas of photos that are dark with shadows. Now let’s see how Recovery can help bring back definition to the lighter, over-exposed areas for an overall even tone.

Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC)

Yikes! Atrocious lighting here. Just ghastly. But it’s not as if I could say, “Ah, excuse me Mr. Peacock, would you mind stepping into this shade for me? That’s right, now tiiiilt.. Look at me… Got it! Thanks!”

Not really.

The first thing I did was correct the over-exposed areas in the photo by adjusting the Recovery.

Next I used Fill Light to brighten the shadows to even out the lighting in the photo.

Now all this photo needs is a little Vibrance and Saturation to go from flop to fab!

It may not be flawless lighting, but it’s a lot better than what we started out with, right?? I always look for nice, soft lighting, but unfortunately, sometimes harsh lighting can’t be helped. Thanks to Fill Light & Recovery, now I don’t stress out about it as much.

Noise Reduction

This is a new feature in Lightroom 3. It’s another tool that can fix a bad lighting situation. If you’ve got terribly dim lighting, are forced to bump up your ISO, then end up with an abundance of unpleasant grain in your photo, Noise Reduction can take care of that for you.

Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC)

Let’s start out with this photo. A not-too-remarkable beach sunset. We’ll to work our way up to the Noise Reduction in this photo.

I started out by adjusting the Fill Light and Blacks.

Next I manually adjusted the White Balance. Since there was nothing really white to click on with the White Balance Dropper, I manually dragged the Temp & Tint sliders.

It needed a lot more blue, so I decreased the Temp. It was also a little too green for my liking, so I increased the tint. Now this is all very subjective, so just drag and play until you like what you see.

This may look a little blue now, but Vibrance and Saturation, always warms the photo up a bit.

Now the photo is gorgeous with color, but if you look closely at the sky, you can see a little noise and grain has appeared. Now let’s put Lightroom’s Noise Reduction to work.

Color. First, start by moving the color slider to the right just until all the random colors in the photo disappear. If it starts effecting the overall color of the photo, move it back to the left until you find the right balance.

Luminance. Then adjust the luminance slider to smooth and soften the remaining grain, being careful not to render the full image too blurry.

Here’s the result. Much better than the photo above! This subtle feature makes a huge difference in the overall appearance of the photo.

Cloning

Now if you’ll indulge me just one final feature. See that sign off in the horizon in the sunset photo above? It’s kinda distracting. Let’s get rid of it. In Lightroom.

Simply adjust the brush to the size of your imperfection, click on it, then drag the brush to an area of the photo you want to duplicate in the original spot. That’s it.

Here’s our final before and after of the beach sunset.

Oh! One more cool feature to mention. Batch Editing. If you’ve got multiple photos that all need the same correction, you can batch edit the lot of them by clicking CTRL-C while under the Develop tab in Lightroom. Select the settings you want to copy, then highlight the photo or photos you’d like to apply those settings to. Click CTRL-V to apply. Done! Quick and easy.

Try Lightroom free for 30 days and see if you love it as much as I do.

Comment navigation

Amanda, this is truly a timely post. I purchased LR3 while it was on sale at Amazon. I also purchased Scott Kelby’s book. I was having a hard time making heads or tails of it all. I was beginning to regret my purchase and reverted back to picnik because it was just easier. Now I’m feeling a little more confident. Thank you, thank you for posting this.

Awesome tutorial! I too use Lightroom 3 for at least 90% of my editing and can easily say that it saves me tons of time. I still prefer Photoshop for retouching faces and intricate detail work, but most of the images I create for our blog never even see Photoshop. It really is amazing how the fill light and recovery tool can give new life to an image. I also love being able to set presets for my exports. Being able to export the images to the exact size that I want for the blog or for print, with or without a copyright image … So many ways to save time and be more productive :)

I use LR3 for 100% of my editing. I have PS on my computer but whenver I try to use it, I become so overwhelmed by the way it’s laid out and actions and layers and the whole thing, really, and I quickly close it as fast as I opened it and revert back to my trusty LR.

I adore!! this post and all the tips and tricks you gave. I found myself nodding in agreement, i.e. that saturation will make things red/yellow quickly, won’t regret adding vibrance and so many other things…

And other things were features I never use, i.e. white balance. I circumvent that tool by playing with others but now that I know it’s that easy, I’m sold!

Your photos are always so gorgeous and it’s fun to see what you started with and what you ended up with…all thanks to LR. And if you can do all this without another program, amen!

Thanks so much for this great tutorial. I received LR3 for Christmas and have yet to break it out of it’s box. Just the thought of it “maybe” being difficult to use was making me very apprehensive. You definitely gave me the push I needed to install this software.

I have to say the thought of trying out another editing program makes me want to pull a blanket over my head. I did a trial on LR and the layout was just overwhelming for me but I think it was more because I was taught on Photoshop. One day I may branch out! :-)

Because of a prior post when you wrote about LR, I purchased the software. I haven’t loaded it yet, but am even more excited about the photo editing possibilities after seeing this post. Thank you, THANK YOU!!! I am loading my new LR software tonight. I am an avid PSE user, which I may still use. But I think LR may become my new best friend. Please continue to post about LR as I am new to the product and know nothing about it. Again, thanks — and please keep up the awesome tutorials!

You must be a mind reader! I bought the LR Student/Teacher edition a few months back and have noy used it yet and I was just second guessing myself thinking I should have bought PS instead but thanks to your lessons, I’m happy I have LR. Now I just have to put your lessons into actions! Thank you so much for posting these lessons.

This is just the post I needed!! Thank you so much for taking the time to explain how to use it’s best features! I have both LR and PS CS5 and I don’t have a clue how to use PS either of them at all! This really did help! Now, Could you help a beginner out with the world of presets and actions on both of the programs? I just have no clue!

GREAT POST! Thank you so much for this information. I’ve been using picnik for the most part to do my editing. I’ve been wanting to step my editing game up but couldn’t figure out which to purchase between Cs5, lightroom, and elements. Like what is the difference between them all? Do/Have you used elements ? How does it compar to lightroom?

Thank you Amanda! This was a fabulous article. I am just starting out with LR this year to edit my photos, and I pinned this article, but I just may print it out to keep it handy! I love that you simplify stuff because I don’t want to spend hours retouching my photos, but I want to spend enough time to get that “wow” factor! :)

I share your love for LR! I was looking for an editing program that wasn’t too costly and LR was perfect. I had a lot of people recommend it to me, and I couldn’t be happier. It is all that I use and it is enough to tweak my photos “just right”. Thanks for the explanation on noise reduction. I haven’t used that one too much, but your tutorial is very helpful.

Amanda, you are a FABULOUS tutor!! I don’t have LR yet, but this tutorial sure makes me want to try it out. I love how simple and easy you make it to understand the steps. Thank YOU for this great tutorial!

Fab tutorial. The screenshots and explanations of how the different alterations will affect the image or color is wonderful. I am a long-time user of Photoshop and am starting to try Lightroom instead for my photos. One thing I find with tutorials for both is they tell you the HOW but don’t always explain the WHY. Without the latter, how will I understand what I’m doing and be able to put the knowledge to future problem solving, eh? Thanks so much for the great tutorial and tips that include the why of it!!

I’ve never used LR, but I’ve heard great things about it, so thanks for this!

I recently took a class on Adobe Bridge & how easy it is to use it to organize your images & graphics across the Adobe Suite. The point of me telling you this is that, inside of Bridge, is a tool called Camera Raw. (Under File > Open in Camera Raw) And that is where you’ll find the white balance tool, as well as applying clarity, vibrance, etc, etc, etc to your images. After you make your adjustments, you can then double-click the image to open it in PS to do any additional editing, like running actions and whatnot. :)

Hi Amanda – love your blog and while I think parts of your tutorial are great, I kind of disagree with some of it, particularly with the whole removal of the sign in the last picture. While I agree and accept that many professional photographers use this type of software to enhance and touch up photos, I think removing things from photos, in contradiction to the natural state is…well, personally, I don’t agree with it! Maybe I’m just an antiquarian and I love the fact that photography was originally used as a way to capture things as is. While I am not against technological advances, I think photography loses some of it’s credibility when everything is enhanced. Anyway, end of my two cents. I do adore your blog and find your posts very entertaining and yes, find your photos great too :)

I think I speak for everyone when I say THANK YOU for taking the time to share. You share, because you care. That is something you don’t see in many people these days. Thank you so very much for your help. This really helped. I have been stuck in Photoshop CS (yeah the old version), and I am now going to try lightroom. Thanks!!!

I have photoshop CS5 also but I have been using a $20 program called camera bag 2 (you can get the beta version free!!) that has a lot of the features you mentioned here like the sliders and straightening, ect. You can’t edit things out of the picture with it so I still have to use photoshop for that but I like it a lot. My husband made fun of me for buying another editing program when we have the fancy master collection of PS. I told him the other one is just simpler;)

This was a great tutorial! Thanks for all of the detail. I’ve used Photoshop for the past two years to do all of my editing. I only started using Lightroom after I went on vacation last year. I had to make small edits to over 300 photos! I knew that would take forever in Photoshop, so I learned Lightroom. Now I use it to bulk organize and make initial edits. I still go back into Photoshop to do the fine tuning.

Love, love this tutorial. I agree that it is so clear and easy to understand.

I am still working on my camera skills and many of my SOOC shots are just plain lacking and blah. I tend not to focus on the settings and just the photo subject. So, now I am going to fire up Lightroom, which I bought a year ago and was clueless about the capabilities, and start playing!

What a fantastic post. I have Photoshop and think I’ll stick with it for a while since I got it not too long ago but I love your tutorial on Lightroom. There are tons of Photoshop tutorials out there and it’s great to see one for something else. It helps show some features of another program and can help decide if I should purchase the program. So THANK YOU!

Thanks for sharing this. I have always really disliked editing {used photoshop for clients photo’s} but it looks like I should have used lightroom. I never did heavy edits or ran actions..just some fixes and s curves, so lightroom would have been the place for me. Do you shoot RAW?

I was introduced to lightroom about a year ago and I absolutely love how it helps you edit things a great deal quicker than PS. Great explination on most of the big features. I hope those starting into photography find this super helpful! I know I did :-)

Thank you SO much for this post! I am so overwhelmed using Photoshop sometimes that I was worried that this would be similar. It’s not, and I LOVE it! I downloaded the free trial, but I will definitely be purchasing it within the next couple of weeks!

What a wonderful tutorial! I was like so many of your other readers about a year ago…heard so many good things that I bought LR, but it just wasn’t making sense to me. Then I found some really helpful videos online and it all became much clearer. I do most of my editing in LR3 and just downloaded the LR4 public beta last night which seems even better!

Thank you! You have opened my eyes to Lightroom! I have had it for well over a year but only used it for presets which are great, but tend to make photos look too edited. I am in the process of making a Blurb Book with hundreds of photos to be to be just slightly improved and it has already saved me so much time in Lightroom. I usually i would do this in Photoshop which can be dreadfully slow! And i am loving the fill light tool!

Damn girl, you should get a commission from Lightroom! I think I’ve said it before, but I love your posts. They are so informative and fun. Where on earth do you learn all this stuff? Cooking, photography, fonts and technology stuff…. very cool. I’m going to go now and put Lightroom on my birthday wish list!!!

Thank you for sharing your tips in this post, Amanda!!! I learned so much. I use LR3, but because I taught myself (out of desperation), there were a few tricks I never learned/realized. It’s interesting to see how [differently] other photographers edit their photos. I rely heavily on exposure/contrast/clarity, but it seems like you use fill light/recovery for similar effects…? I’ll have to try those out.

I got Elements 10 on sale a couple months ago, but it’s still sitting in the box. Now I’m not sure I even need to open it. If you ever feel like writing another photo editing post like this… :)

I have been in a love hate relationship with my PSE. I am not sure if I could handle doing another program…even though it looks really cool! It seems easier to use than PSE!
I also don’t think my computer can handle more photo editing software! Yikes!

Hi, thanks for the tutorial. Been having LR for a while now, but never really use it much because it confused me in some weird way, so I stick to PS to edit my pictures. But your tutorial really help me a lot to understand the magic that LR have..

I am just starting with Lightroom and your tips are some of the best I have seen on the web, including the Adobe tutorials. Thanks for simplifying the process for me! Looking forward to applying your tips!

Thanks so much for posting this! I just recently added LR to my editing software, and was slowly trying to figure some of these things out without getting overwhelmed- which is really easy to do! These tips are great and will REALLY help editing! Do you use any presets in LR and if so- which are your favorites?

I have always wanted more than Picasa to edit my photos but I never knew what program would be best for me. Lightroom looks really cool, but is it really THAT expensive? I am not a professional and I only have a digital camera. I use my pictures for scrapbooking and that is all. What would you recommend for me?? My hope is to get a really good camera but that won’t be for awhile :)

I don’t have lightroom but I have just put it on my wish list. I really enjoy reading your photography posts because you do such a fantastic job explaining things in a way I think everyone understands. Not only are you a very talented photographer but a talented teacher as well.

Awesome post! How does LR measure up to PSE? I have only used PS and PSE and I love it. I am curious though was the difference between LR and PSE might be, since PSE is so much more user friendly than straight up PS.

Hi Vanessa! For some reason you have to be on the grid view screen, where you can see all the small thumbnails in order for them all to delete. If you can only see one big picture, that’s the only one that will delete. Hope this helps! :)

Thank you! Yes, that helps. I had deleted a bunch and then all the sudden it wasn’t working and I wasn’t sure why, but now I know. You just saved me some tears and frustration! You look marvelous too!!

Great introduction to Lightroom Amanda! However you got something wrong. Vibrancy doesn’t just effect blue colors, though it may look like that. Vibrance is designed to find the colors in the picture that are dull, and brings the saturation up only on those colors. Any colors that it deems already saturated, it will try to ignore. It also specifically tries to protect skin tone colors, which is why the browns from the earth in that picture stayed the same, as they are the same color as skin tones. It’s a great tool to use especially with portraits.

The saturation slider actually just takes the entire photo and ups the saturation overall. So all colors, even blue will become more saturated.

I have yet to try lightroom but a friend of mine who photographed our wedding loves it! She says it makes editing so easy… esp considering you can do batch items in it. The only warning I have for anyone who might read this comment (considering the article was posted over a month ago) is that you really need to back your photos up. Lightroom can accidentally erase your photos from the directory of your computer. My friend who did our wedding had the program crash and the photos were gone from the program. When she went to bring the originals back in, they were gone as well. As I haven’t played with lightroom, I don’t know if there is a setting to import and not work on the originals or if it always works and saves to the files you import. Either way she had to buy a recovery program to recovery the files from the hard drive as the directory listings of our photos were gone. She found most of them but others were lost. So if you plan on editing with lightroom, save all the originals to a separate disk somewhere just in case lightroom crashes and takes your photo directory with it. =)

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